I mean, of course, our professional critics. It is plain that I am not setting out to praise them--not even by calling them villains, for villains must, to satisfy my conception of the scale on which the intellectual drama of the race has been played, possess a certain epical character. There is another world of criticism, the academic world, whose faults have often been exposed scornfully and truthfully. Lying out of the eye of the reading public, it never bears any relation, according to the professional critics, with what is being currently written. Yet it has its virtues of course: there is a laudatory paper for some one to write on recent advances in American literary scholarship: within academic circles there has grown up the only critical movement in our land now worthy of international interest, and the leaders of this movement, Professors Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, are--I have several times committed myself to the assertion--the best living critics America can show. It is not with the academic world nor with humanism, however, that I am here dealing, but with the critics of the past fifteen years who have enjoyed something like popularity. First, let us follow the figure of the late Stuart P. Sherman, once a successful university professor, as he flies away from the campus into the full light of public attention beating upon the world of professional criticism. Stuart P. Sherman is of exceptional interest to us. He admired Matthew Arnold: he wrote a popular exposition of Arnold, and a course of his entirely devoted to Arnold is said to have been popular with the students at the University of Illinois. Let us then, noting this affinity, measure Sherman by Arnold. The difference in their prose is the difference between distinction and mere competence. Sherman’s is democratic: it is as if written in shirt-sleeves or talked with the feet on the table, the writer or speaker deliberately putting on easy manners. Note the “It’s-a-plain-man-speaking” effect in the following typical passage at the beginning of Sherman’s essay, _Towards an American Type_: “When I was in college, I used to poke around in the library a good deal looking for books which would take me out of the shallow water of college life into the deep channel of experience, into the serious life of the world. And naturally enough the works of Tolstoy came into my hands. Now one knows what a typical Tolstoy novel is, etc.”[63] Lucid writing, of course, but it is not charming: it has none of Arnold’s aristocratic sweetness.